Reopen public schools when Trump kids enroll there

My children were born here and attended public schools in central Phoenix from kindergarten through high school. In that time our family came to know a number of great teachers, coaches, counselors, administrators and others, witnessing first-hand the limited resources they dealt with and the sacrifices they were willing to make.

These are experiences that President Donald Trump and his children and grandchildren cannot identify with.

Under normal circumstances, that’s perfectly okay. If you have the money, enrolling your children in any hoitytoity private school or academy is no one’s business but yours.

But these are NOT normal circumstances.

We are living through (or trying to live through) a pandemic, and Trump is threatening to cut the funding of public schools that don’t fully reopen their classrooms in the fall. On Sunday, he told Chris Wallace on FOX News, “Schools have to open. Young people have to go to school. And there’s problems when you don’t go to school, too. And there’s going to be a funding problem . ... We’re not going to give them money if they’re not going to school, if they don’t open their schools.”

I’d guess that the parents of school children, and the teachers and school personnel who would be at risk of COVID-19, might be willing to go along with Trump if he were to do one little thing:

Enroll his son Barron in a Washington, D.C., public school. And have his children enroll their children in public schools.

Not a school from a wealthy suburb, but a regular, mixed income, mixed race school doing the best it can with limited resources.

That would prove that Trump believes what he says.

It was disclosed last week that the president won’t allow the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Dr. Robert Redfield, or other officials from the agency to testify before a congressional committee trying to figure out how to best reopen schools.

Trump has called the CDC guidelines for reopening too strict.

Like when he tweeted:

I disagree with @CDCgov on their very tough & expensive guidelines for opening schools. While they want them open, they are asking schools to do very impractical things. I will be meeting with them!!!

The president is willing to gag his own experts rather than let them discuss the situation with members of Congress. And he’s willing to force public schools to reopen no matter what experts might advise.

He is not worried, apparently. Great, then he should enroll his son in public school, and enroll his grandkids in public schools.

He and Melania and Donald Jr. and Ivanka then would receive emails about the COVID-19 safety guidelines that the schools were going to implement, and how it wasn’t going to be easy given the class sizes and the limited resources and so on.

After the Trumps and the other Republicans in his administration and in Congress who have school-age children or grandchildren did what they’re demanding of other parents we’d all feel a lot better about reopening.

It’s simple really. If Trump believes it is safe for the nation’s children to return to public schools he should be willing to put his kids, and his grandkids, on the line.

Then, maybe, we’d all believe it.